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Mobile Marketing in PPC Advertising

Could targeting mobile users be best for your business?

PPC Cardiff – Mobile Marketing

A PPC (pay-per-click) campaign can give businesses a real boost by bringing users to their site. One of the benefits of Google Adwords is that you can optimise your campaign to produce results that are meaningful to your business. For example, you can optimise for brand awareness by aiming for as many impressions as possible, or for conversion rates by advertising a particular product or service.

Some organisations need to target users who are on the move. Restaurants, cafés or offices might want people to know where they are, not what they sell. That’s why Google Adwords allows you to market to users on mobile devices through ad extensions and device targeting.

Ad extensions

‘Ad extensions’ are anything that makes an ad more than the plain text format. Think of them as helping to ‘extend’ the reach of the ad. If you search for a business and it has a ‘Call’ button, that’s a call extension. It allows you to click through straight from the ad, and call them with your query.

For a restaurant, a user’s ability to book a table straight from the Adwords call extension is a valuable conversion for the business. It happens because the information is right where the searcher needs it: on the ad as it shows on their phone. Call extensions might make it easy to book, but the business will still need information to prove whether the ad is worth what they pay for it. That’s why Adwords allows tracking of business goals, so that you can see exactly how your ads are performing – and you can remove or adjust them if they’re not being cost-effective for you.

A ‘location extension’ is what shows the user where the business is – so once you’ve booked your table, you can drive straight to dinner. Adwords campaign settings also allow you to target users within a particular proximity to your business. For example, a café on a pedestrianised street might want to target users within walking distance, to show them exactly where they can grab that mid-shop coffee.

Device targeting

Adwords allows advertisers to include a ‘bid adjustment’ for ads that target mobile devices and tablets. In other words, if mobile ads are valuable to you, you can choose to bid a greater percentage of your budget on them. If they’re not, you can decrease the budget allocated to bids on mobile searches, making it less likely for them to show up. And if you’re running a campaign on the Google Display Network, you can even specify the model of smartphone, operating system and mobile network that you want to target.

In the case of our pedestrianised café, users who are out and about in the area will be more valuable targets than people sitting at their computers several miles away. People at their desktops might see the ad and think ‘I’ll take a look the next time I’m in town!’, but the users on the ground are already looking for lunch. Our café would be sensible to increase the bid on mobile ads.

Whatever a business implements, Adwords will gather data from the campaign to allow you to analyse the effectiveness of your ads. Checking back every few weeks lets you continually refine your ads to make sure they’re bringing in the best results for you.